February

We had a potluck recently at the daycare. Sam was on familiar ground, and would disappear for long chunks of time, to be found exploring the relatively unfamiliar activities of the infant room, or clapping and bouncing along to his teacher’s band (playing hiphop version of kiddie songs) in the preschool room. As was noted in a couple of separate conversations there, the nice thing about having a party at a co-op daycare means that one can be remarkably comfortable not knowing exactly where one’s child is at any given time, knowing that there are lots of adults around, and that any of them feels comfortable monitoring anyone else’s child. One feels this way to a certain extent in any gathering of lots of parents of small children, but dramatically more so in the co-op setting, or so it seemed to many of us at least. We all had a nice time.
Since I was in charge of organizing food and taking pics (I’m on the “Enrichment Committee”), I also managed to snap one of Sam on the climbing structure in the Toddler Room. Recently instead of saying “whee” when going down the slide, he started calling out “Look out below!” He also says it, a bit heartstoppingly, when he’s going down the stairs. (This and many other things he says that are somewhat surprising he's picked up, I think, from the more exuberant of his teachers—and boy is she exuberant. A bit aggressively so, but most of the kids, at least, seem to love it/her.)



Pensive the other day (and, I think, with a mouthful of cewul).



Trainspotting
When daycare closed early recently due to an ice storm, we all went home together mid-afternoon, and I broke out a birthday present a month+ early: the Ikea train set (a deal at $12.99!), with the thought that he’d be engrossed in it enough to let both J. and I work for a little while. But it backfired: Sam kept getting mixed up by the magnets connecting the train cars, which only work one way, and the tracks, which also only connect one way, and calling for help. “Help train! help track!” Now, though, he’s pretty good at doing it by himself, though he still likes help with the tracks (especially getting it in some sort of connected circle).



Trucks and cars:
Sam is wild about vehicles these days: he plays with the trucks and cars that he has much of the time that he’s home, and when we’re out walking or driving somewhere, he labels all the trucks and other notable vehicles (“Big white truck! Deyivery truck! City bus! yellow taxi! Pickup truck! Ambuyance!”) He loooves to look at pictures of trucks/firetrucks/airplanes/trains on the computer; google image search has become newly useful, as has YouTube. The weekend after the aforementioned ice storm, we were running errands in the neighborhood, and stopped for at least 20 minutes on the corner by the drycleaner watching a Bobcat clean the ice off the pavement. Nearly two weeks later, Sam still occasionally says, out of the blue, "I saw Bobcat! Bobcat kween snow!"

Manipulation:
Sam loves to complete sentences, and does so whenever we pause at key points in books (thereby showing that he has even one-week-borrowed library books largely memorized, though apparently by sound and not necessarily comprehension). J. has discovered that one can turn this to one’s advantage when one’s goals aren’t necessarily the same as Sam’s, e.g. for diaper changes (“No change diaper!”) or leaving the house in the morning (“No jacket!”). “Time to change your...” J. will start, and Sam will, despite himself, call softly “diaper!” and after two or three iterations of this is (a) halfway through a diaper change, and (b) fully complying with the process. Smart daddy.

Final note:
We may be buying our apartment. Like, this week. Eee!